Roger Grimes tracked down a Craigslist scammer and interviewed him for Infoworld, getting some surprisingly frank answers about what life is like as a small time online con-artist. (more…)

Techpowerup caught hardware giants MSI and Asus shipping them graphics cards that were preset for a software-based overlock mode, meaning that the cards performed better out of the box for reviewers than they would for customers. (more…)

When billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Steve Forbes get into politics, they firewall their own companies off from their campaigns, demonstrating a basic care about the appearance of conflict of interest -- not so Donald Trump, who rents himself office space, sells himself private jet time, and supplies water, booze, and country club ballrooms. (more…)

“The U.S. government wants to use an obscure procedure—amending a federal rule known as Rule 41— to radically expand their authority to hack,” the EFF says. “The changes to Rule 41 would make it easier for them to break into our computers, take data, and engage in remote surveillance. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoR-NMY-lCsGus the hacker puppeteer (previously) writes, "Since The Media Show began, people have been asking us, 'What do hacking, digital literacy, and media literacy have to do with each other? I don't see the connection.'" (more…)

After 5 years of pretty much exclusively using my Bodum teapot I have gotten so used to it I only notice the process when I’m not at home and have to use a different teapot.I like having a big pot of tea sitting on my desk while I work on the computer but with most teapots the tea continues to gain in strength the longer it stays in the pot; unless you want to outright remove the tea which is nothing but a hot mess. This is the best teapot in my experience for being able to brew tea that can stay in the pot but not continue steeping and increasing in strength.The system is very simple, the strainer inside the teapot has no holes in its bottom section so when the plunger is fully depressed the tea cannot continue to soak in the water as it has been cut off and sealed in the bottom of the strainer.I use it whenever I’m at home and can have 1 liter of tea that is of a consistent strength sitting on my desk, making the only other issue I have to deal with the fact that eventually it will go cold which is an issue I have not found a solution to other than drinking the tea.I was not able to find the exact porcelain model I have online anymore, it seems like Bodum may have discontinued it but they make the same size and shape pot out of borosilicate glass (the stuff pyrex is made from) so if anything its now stronger and more shatter resistant if dropped plus since its now clear you can see exactly how much tea is left in the pot. -- Thomas Webster

Gallium is a metal that melts at 86 degrees F. It's more fun than playing with mercury, and probably safer, too (it *will* temporarily stain your skin gray though, because it's "wet" when liquid and will adhere to the crevices of your skin). My daughter's friend brought some over a couple of weeks ago, and it was such a hit at our house that we had to get some of our own. This 20 gram sample is just $10 including shipping on Amazon.

A letter from the ACLU to lawmakers asked them to vote down the Democrats' proposed limits on firearm sales, but not for the same reasons that the NRA objected to the legislation. (more…)

Don't let the cover art scare you away! The Chronicles of Benjamin Jamison are fun, hero beats the odds, space opera fun. In Thomas Wright's first installment, Call Sign Reaper, we meet familiar characters, then and head off on a familiar plot! Retired special forces type space guy Ben was drummed out of the service on trumped up charges. Instead of disappearing to the Los Angeles underground, he spends a couple months off. Ben is recruited back into service via a bar fight, and an attractive commanding officer. You do know where this is going, right? Get ready to roll your eyes. Thomas Wright gets this genre, and clearly enjoys it. The story rollicks along, and the characters are just getting going. YouStandard indie novel warning: lots of folks have complained of the editing, but I enjoyed the stories enough to not notice much. The novel was free via Kindle Unlimited. The Chronicles of Benjamin Jamison: Call Sign Reaper (Book 1) via Amazon

After watching Ben Ridgway's "Continuum Infinitum" video, everything I looked at seemed to recede for a while. Ben recommends downloading the video and looping it.As you watch the movie for a minute or so and then look away, you will experience a mild optical illusion that feels as if everything you look at is shrinking away from you. This is caused by the motion after-effect (MAE). It is a visual illusion experienced after viewing a moving visual stimulus for a time (tens of milliseconds to minutes) with stationary eyes, and then fixating on a stationary stimulus. The stationary stimulus appears to move in the opposite direction to the original (physically moving) stimulus. The motion aftereffect is believed to be the result of motion adaptation.Neurons coding a particular movement reduce their responses with time of exposure to a constantly moving stimulus; this is neural adaptation. Neural adaptation also reduces the spontaneous, baseline activity of these same neurons when responding to a stationary stimulus. One theory is that perception of stationary objects, for example rocks beside a waterfall, is coded as the balance among the baseline responses of neurons coding all possible directions of motion. Neural adaptation of neurons stimulated by downwards movement reduces their baseline activity, tilting the balance in favor of upwards movement.

Interestingly, you can buy fireworks at Walmart stores in Arizona. You aren't supposed to light them all at once inside the store, though. The gentleman who did will soon learn that fireworks are harder to come by in prison.

"Color Psychology" by Lilly Mtz-Seara (Vimeo) -MUSIC-

"After over 100 hours of work, I present to you Seinfeld.wad," writes Doug Keener. "A replica of Jerry Seinfeld's Apartment from his hit sitcom, Seinfeld!"Join Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine in this neat Doom/Seinfeld crossover! There are many custom textures and sprites to bring you the full experience of being inside Jerry's Apartment, inside Doom 2! Each sprite has audio clips and death animations! Have fun slaughtering the gang relentlessly in this wad about nothing! ... Special Thanks to GIMP 2.0, GZDoomBuilder, Slade3, applekwisp, Seinfeld cast and crew, and the lovely people over at ZDoom forums and wiki.

The NRA -- tone-deaf, intransigent, monied -- are seemingly unstoppable, but if anyone can shoot 'em down, it's Samantha Bee, whose tight, funny, rage-filled 5:30 on America's gun lobby is practically armor-piercing. (via Rolling Stone)

At least five plus a backhoe, if the cow managed to stick its head in a tree. North Yorkshire Fire probably did not train for this, but they saved the cow regardless. (more…)

Etsy artist Andrew Creamer drew North America to look like Tolkein's Middle-Earth. (more…)

It's hard to fund space exploration research -- the commercial applications are speculative and far-off -- but there's never been a better time to study super-efficient, closed-loop botany of the sort that will someday accompany human interplanetary missions, thanks to the need to develop better grow-ops for the burgeoning legal weed market in Canada. (more…)

Photographer Suren Manvelyan continued his series of stunning closeups of eyes by focusing on non-humans. Above: Red-eared turtle. Below, a Fennec fox and a raven. (more…)

Theodor Herzl's seminal 1896 essay Der Judenstaat called for the creation of Jewish state as an answer to the ancient evil of antisemitism; its legacy, Zionism, underpinned the creation of Israel; in Judenstaat, Simone Zelitch's beautifully told, thoughtful and disturbing alternate history, the Jewish state is created in Saxony, not Palestine, and takes the place of East Germany. (more…)

The U.S. Supreme Court today delivered a damaging blow to the Fourth Amendment “by making it even easier for law enforcement to evade its requirement that stops be based on reasonable suspicion,” as a New York Times editorial puts it. Justices ruled 5 to 3 [PDF] that a police officer’s illegal stop of a man on the street should not prevent using against him any evidence obtained from a search connected to that stop. (more…)

Attention, melting Californians and other overheaded personages: I ran across a fine fellow carrying one of these $28 Sourpuss Parasols -- the Kraken -- at Disneyland a couple weeks ago (he was a Boing Boing reader): as the daylight temperatures reach pizza-oven levels, I find myself appreciating just what a clever person this gent was to avail himself of such a fine shade. I've just ordered mine.

"In the 1970s, Foosball was a top 10 professional sport in America," explains the narrator of this Kickstarter campaign. Now they want to make a documentary. (more…)

I have always hated Teflon pans even before hearing how bad it was for you. They just don’t hold up well and the alternative has always been keeping a very well seasoned cast iron pan. I have done this for years, but it takes a fair amount of attention, and is still not a perfect non stick solution. I started trying some of the ceramic coated pans a few years back and have found one to be the best, the Scanpan ($98, Amazon). They are not cheap but I have used their classic fry pan to make eggs every morning for a couple years and the coating looks as good as new and as I have added others to my collection I find that they are the ones I reach for every time. They clean as easy as brand new Teflon pans, come in a variety of handle and lid styles, and hold up better and have none of the toxicity. -- Alexander Rose

How lucky is that Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, gets to charge taxpayers for his $1,600 hairstyling bill? Almost everyone else who suffers from expensive hair syndrome must pay for it out-of-pocket. Guardian:A visit to New York by Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his wife Sara cost the country’s taxpayers $541,886 (£382,000) , according to a detailed breakdown published after months of attempts by his office to prevent its release.The cost – which included thousands of dollars for hairstyling and makeup for Netanyahu – follows a series of other recent controversies over the luxurious life enjoyed by the prime minister at the taxpayer’s expense – not least their travel.... A year earlier, it was revealed that Netanyahu had an annual contract of more than $2,000 with a Jerusalem ice cream parlour to supply his favourite flavour – pistachio.

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, the dark British web series of shorts created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, released its sixth and final episode. If you haven't seen the others that came out starting in 2011, start below first: (more…)

According to Colonial Heights, Virginia police, charged a man with attempted murder for shooting another man several times last week. The shooter's name is Ethan A. Prescott but he is apparently better known by his nickname: Murder.(WWBT)

Some of Mark Zuckerberg's truefans are so appreciative of their hero that they create art in his honor and post it to his Facebook timeline. (via Gizmodo)

Here's one of millions of different paths you can take in the new book, Romeo and/or Juliet: a Chooseable-Path Adventure, by Ryan North.We're joining the story in Act 2 Scene 2, which you'll recognize from the actual Shakespeare play. Juliet has SECRETLY MARRIED Romeo, and now she's waiting at home for Romeo to climb up the sex ladder he sent ahead (Romeo is extremely classy), so they can consummate their marriage! Meanwhile, Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt due to some supremely bad decision making. As Juliet, we've just decided to keep waiting for Romeo. Let's see what (could possibly, depending on what choices we make) happens next, shall we?From ROMEO AND/OR JULIET: a chooseable-path adventure by Ryan North. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016 by Ryan North. Illustrations: Passage 328 © Randall Munroe; Passage 339 © Sara Richard

Science book author extraordinaire Mary Roach has a new book out called Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. (more…)

For a year or so, I've been working with the EFF to get the World Wide Web Consortium to take steps to protect security researchers and new market-entrants who run up against the DRM standard they're incorporating into HTML5, the next version of the key web standard. (more…)

Earlier this month, Daniel Fernandez was sentenced to a six-month jail term while his public defender was in handcuffs, silenced and forced to sit with the accused awaiting trial, having been put in this position by Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Conrad Hafen. (more…)

Peter Wieben's sister is bipolar and homeless in Seattle, living in a van and weaning herself off Klonopin without a doctor's supervision: if she gets the dose wrong, she'll die. (more…)

I'm speaking at Politicon, the “Non-Partisan Politics and Entertainment Fan-Fest,” June 25-26 in Pasadena. It's gonna be fun AND totally weird in the best way. Sessions include an “Ann Coulter vs. Van Jones” smackdown, and Jon Ronson asking the timeless question, “Is Donald Trump a Psychopath.” Some of the other politicians, pundits, and possible psychopaths on the schedule: Bill Nye, Sarah Palin, Larry Wilmore, Vicente Fox, James Carville, Glenn Beck. The original Daily Show cast will be in the house, too.Holy hell, what a lineup. Join me there, and use the Boing Boing discount code BOINGBOING to get 25% off tickets. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=qqXTfMItdCoArizona State University, Nanowrimo, and the Chabot Science Center are commemorating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a series of events, including a short-story contest judged by Elizabeth Bear. (more…)

In this Smithsonian overview, makers and operators point out that they are technically rocket belts, not jet packs. Lots of great vintage footage, including a clunky pre-GoPro helmet cam. (more…)

This goat is the GOAT. (Vault 50)

Magic Leap continues to roll out tantalizing demos of their mixed reality technology, this time imposing the "lost droids" scene into a typical room. (more…)

The Life of Dad posted a challenge: how many cheerios can you stack on your sleeping baby? It looks like 18 is the record. A video posted by Angelica Evans (@iam_angelicaa_mua) on Jun 17, 2016 at 8:00am PDT A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 16, 2016 at 8:32pm PDT A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 17, 2016 at 6:32am PDT A photo posted by Lorena Ruiz (@lorena592) on Jun 16, 2016 at 9:16pm PDT A photo posted by Joe Noack (@joenoack) on Jun 17, 2016 at 7:07am PDT "Challenge accepted. 17 Cheerios and 17 hours in the making / photo capture!! #cheeriochallenge" - #LifeofDad user, Craig Stanley A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 17, 2016 at 10:17am PDT A photo posted by @tmitasha on Jun 17, 2016 at 8:26am PDT

Despite a couple of recent outliers, Donald Trump's polling is grim: 94% unfavorability among black voters being one new number doing the rounds. It's so dire, in fact, Hillary appears set to win in a landslide despite her own shortcomings. Jeet Heer:Trump’s manic, narcissistic, and immature response to the Orlando massacre has been a key turning point—or, looked at another way, a final straw. Just as Republican elites were learning to live with Trump, so long as he kept his promise to act more “presidential,” he’s now made it clear that he’ll continue to be the same old Trump the world has known for decades. The result is that elected Republican officials are starting to un-endorse Trump or say they won’t back his presidential bid. Republican governors in Maryland, Michigan, and Massachusetts have all said they won’t vote for Trump.

Compare Fruits is your one-stop shop for comparing fruit. Whether you are comparing bananas with plantains, lemons with limes, or, indeed, apples with oranges, it has all you need for your fruit-comparison needs. (Warning: nutritional woo, but no worse than gadget spec woo) [via]

"The UroClub is the discrete, sanitary way for your urgent relief. Created by a Board Certified Urologist, it looks like an ordinary golf club, but contains a reservoir built into the grip to relieve yourself. The UroClub is leak proof, easy to clean and no more embarrassing moments."

Takehito Etani made a beeping artistic contraption called The Masticator that tracks his food chewing. In 2005, he used it at an Arby's, drawing funny looks from from fellow restaurant patrons.

Luggage is fine...but having the right duffel? That’s key. If you’re on the go, the portability, durability and versatility of slinging a good ol' duffel over your shoulder can’t be beaten. There's a reason the Bomber Barrel Duffel Bag was Kickstarter’s most funded bag ever. Find out for yourself with a Complete Bomber Barrel Duffel Bag Set, on sale now for just $59.99 (70% off) in the Boing Boing Store.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoq4bGnHjqY&w=560&h=315]The lightweight design sports weather-resistant material, waterproof zippers, military-grade clips, and rivet-reinforced carry handles. It'll take everything the world throws at it...and come back for more.Its design features inner and outer pockets for securing both big and small essentials, as well as a padded quick release shoulder strap. Plus, the bag comes with an accompanying travel kit for shorter excursions.Own a duffel as reliable as it is functional for a whopping 70% off its retail price while this deal lasts. And while you're at it, enter to win an absolutely free Macbook to go inside your snazzy new duffel. Act fast for your chance at a premium laptop worth almost $1,300 (you know you want to).

Lam Wing Kee, one of the dissident Hong Kong booksellers who was kidnapped to the mainland by Chinese spies, only to surface on TV confessing to "illegal trading," now says he was forced into the confession. (Image: BBC)

In 2013, the Supreme Court heard Kirtsaeng, a copyright case brought by the publisher Wiley, who argued that legal books became illegal when brought into America, because their copyright licenses were nation-specific. (more…)

As the fight over the FCC's Unlock the Box plan heats up, the cable and satellite TV companies have pulled out all the stops in a bid to force you to continue spending more than $200/year to rent an insecure, power-hungry, badly designed set-top box, rather than introducing competition by letting you buy your cable-box on the open market. (more…)

If youth unemployment -- and the lack of good entry-level jobs for college grads -- was being driven by workplace automation, American productivity (value created per hour worked) would be soaring, rather than stagnating. (more…)

Everyone hates Nazis. For decades they've been the go-to villains for movies that need bad guys. With the modern sensitivity toward Native Americans, Russians and other traditional villains of American screenwriting, I predict we will see a resurgence in film and television with lots more nasty Nazis. The Man in the High Castle, anyone?So what could be more fun than a gift whose function perfectly follows its form than this candle of that nasty Nazi rat-bastard SS agent Arnold Ernst Toht, Gestapo agent? The little weasel gets his well-deserved comeuppance in perfect style when his face melts off like hot butter, when the hell hiding in the Ark of the Covenant is unleashed at the end of first Indiana Jones flick Raiders of the Lost Ark.You gotta love this candle! Let's watch his soul get sucked out of his stinking Nazi skull with the flick of a match. Available from Firebox for a mere $28.39 in the UK (hence the odd price), I really have to buy two: one to keep, and one to melt.